A Look at the Gambling Industry's Perspective on Mobile App Development
Anyone who has ever laid hands on a smartphone will be able to wax lyrical on the benefits of their respective app store. Those of you who remember what a dial-up connection sounds like will know
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Blackjack on a mobile phone how much of a difference it makes being able to go to a single place to find everything you could possibly need on your phone. If you want to talk to your friends, the chances are you’ll be jumping into the app store to download Facebook before you actually punch their number in and actually call them – if that isn’t a sign of the times, what is?
This is something which the gambling industry realised a few years back. If people want to play casino games at home on their desktop, the chances are fairly high that they want to play casino games on the go, too. Casinos around the world took a look at what was popular – blackjack and slots – and decided that they were going to make a lot of money by letting people play online without being tied to their PC. They were correct.
The first iPhone was released in 2007. Within three years the mobile gambling industry was worth £41m in the UK alone – a country with some of the strictest gambling legislation in the world. With the mass proliferation of smartphones and their respective apps, this number has only grown. In 2013, the British bookie William Hill announced that 42% of its sports betting revenue came from mobile devices, with a 298% increase in mobile betting revenue over the year as a whole.
Mobile betting is the fastest growing part of the industry, and it has already proven incredibly lucrative. The trick from here, many casinos were quick to realise, was to lock their customers in. If you’re playing on Safari or Chrome on your phone, your gaming experience is locked into the specifications of that specific app. Since people are interacting with your site through an app, you may as well let them do so through your app – an app where they have instant access they need, without having to worry about them accidentally navigating away from your page and winding up at one of your competitors’ sites.
By providing your own app you can provide a world of incentive, too. Signup bonuses and app download bonuses are the obvious examples here, but it doesn’t end there. Gamification of the mobile gaming experience is an area which has really taken off in the last few years, with certain casinos offering an RPG-esque metagame where you level up as you play, completing quests across the app for a variety of different bonuses.
The only problem from here is that once you’ve designed this brilliant little app, you need it to be seen by the people you want to play your games. This is done in two ways – firstly through clever marketing and secondly through something called ASO. The marketing we’ve seen on the TV, with constant late night ads telling you to play blackjack, bingo or the slots on a brand new app. ASO, on the other hand, is slightly more technical. App store optimisation is a subset of SEO which online casinos have been heavily investing in, helping their app rank higher on the app store when you search for terms like “casino”. When there are countless different casino apps on the store, there is a lot of money to be made in having your app appear at the top of the list.
As a result of all this, the world of mobile casino apps is only going to grow over the next few years. Take a quick flick through the app store on your phone and see for yourself just how many casino apps there are out there, all vying for your attention. This is a highly lucrative area for the industry which has showed zero signs of slowing down in recent years – and it is most certainly here to stay.